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Incl. tables and bibl. references. ; Rigged calls for tender, embezzlement of funds, illegal registration fees, academic fraud - there is no lack of empirical data illustrating the diverse forms that corruption can take in the education sector. Surveys suggest that fund leakage from education ministries to schools can be huge, bribes and payoffs in teacher recruitment and promotion lower the quality of the pool of teachers, and illegal payments for school entrance contribute to low enrolment and high drop-out rates. This book presents conclusions drawn from IIEP's research into ethics and corruption in education. It aims to build awareness among decision-makers and education managers of the importance of combating corruption, to provide them with tools to detect and assess corruption problems, and to guide them in formulating strategies to curb malpractices. After defining the key concepts of corruption, transparency, accountability and ethics, it identifies the main opportunities for corruption in education. It describes tools that can be used to assess corruption problems - such as perception and tracking surveys. Lessons are drawn from strategies used worldwide to improve transparency and accountability in educational management. The authors bring these together in a list of recommendations for policy-makers and educational managers. They argue that transparent regulatory systems, greater accountability through strengthened management capacity, and enhanced ownership of the management process can help build corruption-free education systems.

Recent empirical work shows that judicial dependence can explain high levels of corruption. This paper examines how the dependence of judiciaries influences corruption at different levels of the government in a model where the central government, low-level officials, and the judiciary are corrupt. In the model, the central government sells offices to low-level officials and demands ex-post payments enforced by the judiciary. Because an independent judiciary can rule against the central authority and accept bribes from stealing low-level officials, it reduces corruption at the higher level of government but promotes corruption at the lower level. Therefore, even if highly corrupt, an independent judiciary may reduce total corruption. We provide empirical evidence which is in line with this result.

Because corruption must be hidden from the public and is not enforced by courts it entails transaction costs, which are larger than those from legal exchange. This suggests that corrupt contracts are primarily relational contracts where legal exchange serves as a basis for sealing and enforcing corrupt agreements. Legal exchange not only provides for corrupt opportunities, but for the necessary enforcement mechanisms. Examples of such legal exchange are long-term business exchange, belonging to the same firm or political party or being embedded in social relationships. The latter may even comprise the engagement in charitable institutions. Reform should not only focus on limiting opportunities for corrupt behavior but also on impeding the enforcement of corrupt agreements.

Identifying core values is the first step in creating a shared understanding in society regarding the expected behaviour of public office occupants. Certain countries publish a list of core values to guide their civil servants in their daily operations, drawn from social normal's, democratic principles, and professional culture. The changing environment of the public sector requires the articulation of core values. Many countries have updated their core public service values in recent years, and additional revisions are still being implemented. In the course of these revisions, countries have again emphasized "traditional" values, giving them modern connotations and adding "new" values to reflect a results-based culture of public service.

Reprinted from volume one of the Iowa applied history series published at Iowa City in 1912 by the State Historical Society of Iowa. ; Mode of access: Internet.

This chapter advances an eccentric model of corruption both to understand various disturbing features of Donald Trumps political career, and to explore the risks of using the term corrupt as a pejorative label for Trump. Here corruption refers to the transfer of value from higher to lower positions along a moral gradient through a violation of the sacred. Curiously, Trump himself celebrates his own sacrilegious transfer of value from the "elite" to those ordinary (coded white) people positioned at the bottom (the so-called Deplorables) of a moral gradient identified with "The Establishment." Therefore, adversarial assertions of Trumps corruption risk mimetically affirming the modes of agency he arrogates to himself. More specifically, they risk testifying to his successful transfer of (mostly symbolic) value through a set of three tactics-- excitation, transduction, and shunting-- explored throughout the chapter. ; Accepted version ; This chapter was accepted by the book editors in 2020 and then the publisher accepted the collection in 2021. ; Yes (Peer reviewed?)

Die explorative Studie nutzt qualitative Interviews mit einfachen Bürgern um das Problem der allgegenwärtigen und anhaltenden Alltagskorruption in post-sowjetischen Staaten zu analysieren. Es wird zum einen nach den zugrunde liegenden Einstellungen, Werten und Erwartungen der Klienten gefragt, die diese korrupt handeln lassen, zum anderen wird der Einfluss dieser alltäglichen informellen Praktiken auf Entwicklung und Qualität von demokratischen Institutionen in post-sowjetischen Staaten untersucht. Die Ergebnisse des ersten Teils legen nahe, dass sich der größte Einfluss auf die Bereitschaft zu korruptem Handeln aus der Kombination der Effekte aus sowjetischem Erbe und rationalem Verhalten, das die Situation als ein Problem kollektiven Handelns interpretiert, ergibt. Bezüglich der Frage nach der Wirkung von informellen Praktiken und mit ihnen einhergehenden sowjetischen Einstellungen auf die Entwicklung von funktionierenden demokratischen Institutionen zeigt die Studie eine Reihe von problematischen Aspekten auf: Zuvorderst den Vorzug von individuellen vor kollektiven Lösungen sowie den anhaltenden Effekt von informellen Netzwerken, kombiniert mit einer tiefen Abneigung gegenüber dem Staat und einem schwachen Gefühl der eigenen Wirksamkeit. Zusammengenommen bilden diese ein schwerwiegendes Hindernis für politische Partizipation und die Entwicklung eines gesellschaftlichen Gemeinschaftsgefühls. Entgegen der gängigen Forschungs-meinung hat diese Studie also gezeigt, dass bestimmte Formen von Korruption, genauer der besondere Typ der post-sowjetischen informellen Transaktionen, einen negativen Einfluss auf die Entwicklung demokratischer Institutionen haben und die Wirkungsrichtung zwischen Demokratie und Korruption nicht allein von schwachen demokratischen Institutionen zu mehr Korruption zeigt. ; The explorative study uses qualitative interviews with ordinary citizens to examine the problem of pervasiveness and persistence of administrative corruption in the Soviet successor states. It analyses the problem on two levels, taking an interest in the underlying attitudes, values and expectations of why clients engage in corrupt transactions, and asking about the influence of these low-level informal practices on the development and quality of democratic institutions in post-soviet states. Regarding the former, the analysis established the combined effect of Soviet legacy and rational behaviour interpreting the situation as a problem of collective action. These two are the main drivers influencing the readiness for corrupt transactions. They mutually reinforce each other and the highest propensity to act corruptly is found when these two aspects coincide. The answer to the question whether the lasting impact of informal practices and Soviet attitudinal patterns going along with them conflicts with the development of well-functioning, democratic institutions was clearly affirmative. The study showed that it is particularly a preference of individual over collective solutions and the continued effect of persisting informal networks combined with a deep disregard of the state and a low feeling of agency that pose serious obstacles to the quality of political participation and to the sense of community on the societal level. Contrary to the common argument the study has therefore established that the causality in the nexus between democracy and corruption is not a one-way road leading from weak democratic institutions to higher levels of corruption, but that certain forms of corruption, more precisely the specific type of post-soviet informality, have a negative impact on the development of democratic institutions making causality follow a bidirectional path and constituting a vicious circle of informality.

Christianity as a consummate and the most individualized religion, allows one to best harmonize the relationships between an individual, society, and the state. Christianity roots in the fundamental sentiment of personal responsibility for own thoughts and deeds. That the Christian doctrine has an immense variety of tools to resolve the whole gamut of socio-political issues has been brilliantly evidenced in hosts of victories on a civilization scale. Being a pro-active religion, Christianity has been the driving force behind the groundbreaking, epoch-making processes both at political and scientific level. Christianity has brought about a new model of state economy basing on equity and liberalism. However, having swerved from good intentions, the modern Christian nations are caught in the economic crisis, facing the urgency to regain their economic strength lavished on the rest of civilizations. The only way to reach this is to reconsider Christian values.

A fundamental problem in all political systems is that the people in power may extract rents to the detriment of the general public. In a democracy, electoral competition and information provided by the media may keep such rent extraction at bay. We develop a simple model where rents are decreasing in the degree of political competition and voter information. In line with our theoretical predictions, we find that both increased political competition and increased local media coverage substantially reduce direct measures of legal political rents among local governments in a non-corrupt democracy (Sweden).

When Hugo Chávez became president of Venezuela, he came with the promise to eradicate corruption and clean up politics. However, research shows that the level of corruption in Venezuela has actually risen after Chávez came to power. A question thus emerges: Why has Venezuela's level of corruption increased after Chávez became president? Furthermore, neither political institutions nor the population have held Chávez accountable for violating his promise, despite the fact that corruption seem to penetrate the entire system and that Venezuelans have overthrown corrupt politicians before. This makes us wonder, how did Chávez avoid being held accountable for corruption during his rule? As this research takes the form of a historical case study, we have applied several different theoretical lenses to obtain a deeper understanding how corruption unfold in the Venezuelan context as well as understanding why Chávez has not been held accountable through checks and balances. To answer our questions, we have used a mixed method approach to analyze and discuss the findings. This has enabled us to triangulate our findings, as well as giving us the opportunity to explore material which is not always easily captured by one approach alone. Firstly, we analyzed the relationship between democracy, media and corruption. Secondly, we looked at how the division and centralization of power affect democratic tools. Thirdly, we saw corruption in the light of economical explanations. And fourthly, we examined the relationship between natural resources and corruption. Our main findings were that corruption has increased with the deterioration of the democratic tools intended to suppress it. The power has been centralized into the hands of the presidency, and economic freedom has been suppressed. This has severely harmed checks and balances, and allowed corruption to thrive. Yet, even though corruption would theoretically entail more inequality and less prosperity, the findings suggest otherwise. In fact, as oil revenues are so great in Venezuela, there is room for both corruption and high social spending. This further leads us to understand why Chávez has not been held accountable by his people either. If a population has the impression of politics being corrupt by nature, which in respect to Venezuela's political history is reasonable to assume, they are less likely to criticize the one corrupt politician whose policies actually benefit them. In relation to the poor, he became like a modern day Robin Hood. Further, as the majority of Venezuelan voters remain poor, this explains why Chávez continued to win elections. Overall, this study reveals why and how a democratic government can be utterly corrupt, and still not be held accountable. ; M-DS

An FBI investigation of county purchasing activities in the mid 1980s resulted in the conviction of 55 of Mississippi's 410 county supervisors. Analyzing data from the state's 1987 county supervisor elections and hypothesizing that candidates' demands for votes increase as the gains from holding public office increase, we predict larger voter turnouts in the 26 of the state's 82 counties where supervisor corruption was exposed. Holding constant average voter turnout in the preceding U.S. presidential election and controlling for the competitiveness of supervisor races, we find that more Mississippians indeed voted in corrupt than in non-corrupt counties.

The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria, was founded during the period of détente in 1972 to bring together scientists from East and West to research shared problems, and thus to build a "bridge" between the two opposed systems. The underlying image of knowledge was in stark contrast to the intellectual culture established in East Germany. This article reconstructs East Germany's role at IIASA. Even if participation was considered important for displaying East German science, I argue that its contribution was caught up in the precepts of the western scholar as a class enemy. Using the records of the party and the Stasi, I show this along the best documented case, the economist Harry Maier, who was one of the few social scientists who visited IIASA for two years between 1978 and 1980, and then, in 1986, used a conference visit to escape from East Germany.

When the Indian Ocean tsunami swept across a large part of the Indonesian province of Aceh on December 26, 2004, the international response was extraordinary. People everywhere opened their hearts and their wallets to the victims. Governments, Non-Government Organisations and international agencies did likewise. In no time nearly US$6 billion had been pledged for Aceh's reconstruction and rehabilitation. Because of Indonesia's reputation for high levels of corruption, the Indonesian Government and donors gave strong public undertakings that the funds would not end up in the wrong hands. This paper examines the problems that are likely to be encountered in meeting such an undertaking.

Democratic systems are unable to operate without the active engagement of the population. According to Robert Dahl, an ideal democracy fulfils several criteria7. Interestingly, all stress the importance of civil engagement. Elected politicians rely on active citizenship. Dahl's interpretation makes clear why transparency is an important institutional design (Hood & Heald, 2006, p.211). It engages society in the democratic process, as accessible information gives them the opportunity to have a say. Democracy can not only be discussed as a political system, but also as a cultural space. Democratic cultures rely on certain types of behaviours which are guided by 'positive' norms, for example a sense of responsibility. Transparency supposedly helps endorse these norms. It has also been advocated as a way to fight against undemocratic cultures, such as corruption8. It is argued that it replaces 'negative' undemocratic norms with 'positive' ones. This chapter focuses on the question as to whether, and to what extent, transparency promotes 'positive' norms and trust in one country, Mozambique, which is affected by a high degree of corruption. Corruption is understood as the abuse of public office for private gain (Kolstad & Wiig, 2009, p.522). The question engages with two points of view. Dominique Bessire stipulates that transparency undermines norms and trust as it depicts individuals as calculating and opportunistic (Bessire, 2005, p.428). For her, transparency constrains individual freedoms, and is thus essentially amoral and unethical (p.430). For Ivar Kolstad and Arne Wiig (2009), transparency introduces 'positive' norms as it fosters cooperation and trust (p.529). It establishes a sense of responsibility and a willingness to be open.

Reproduced from type-written copy. ; Bibliography: leaf 39. ; Mode of access: Internet.